TFS Reviews

We use this solution mostly for our clients. It's a lifecycle management tool. We use it for the entire lifecycle of software development. Then we deliver it, and use it for production support. Basically, you can always use it for your requirements, as well as to track the health of your project.

I have found almost all of the features valuable because it integrates well with your Microsoft products. If a client is using the entire Microsoft platform, then TFS would be definitely preferable. It integrates with the digital studio development environment as well. So, almost all the features for TFS are useful.

The good thing is, unlike other products, you get a complete suite of features. Many of the other vendors don't have an entire suite of features available. If you take Jira for example, the requirements might be captured in a different tool. Or maybe there are other features in the lifecycle development environment and different tools might be used, but TFS offers a consolidated package. You don't have to go to other tools to capture your requirements, or maybe even if you're doing build and release planning.

Nowadays, the shift is from Waterfall to Agile, so many vendors have come up with their own products. For example, Jira has many built-in features which support the PI planning. Overall, I think it would be useful to have something similar where Microsoft comes up with supporting concepts of scaling Agile in TFS so that clients don't have to look for a separate tool. That would be helpful.

With the latest version, I'm not too aware of whether Microsoft has implemented the PI planning features, the collaboration features, in TFS or not. But I think that would be one of the features that might be helpful to the development teams and for the overall planning.

There have also been some security glitches with this solution.

I've used this solution for more than 10 years. I've been working on Microsoft technologies only, and my team members have also been working on TFS for a long time.

The last time I used TFS was in 2020. After that, I moved out of delivery into consulting. I was using the last version before they moved to the cloud version, Azure DevOps.

Earlier, we were using it majorly on-premises. Later on when Microsoft introduced Azure DevOps, then we moved onto the cloud.

It is stable.

It's absolutely scalable. If you are planning for a high availability environment, then you can definitely have a backup environment as well. Then if something goes wrong with your primary server, there is always a backup available, which you can always use.

The support and documentation available on their website are very good.

I would rate them between 4 and 5 on a scale of 1 to 5.

I would give the initial setup a four out of five. It's not very complex. Microsoft provides all the documentation and guidance to do the setup, and even has videos available. The guidance is very good.

The length of deployment is on a case-by-case basis. Some of the clients may have a complex environment, some may not. So it depends on what kind of supporting tools are available on the client's premises. TFS is not that complex to set up, unless the environment design is very complex.

Most of the clients have their own support teams for incident management. So, it depends on each of the individual clients. They have the budget, and they will have an entire team to support your TFS and management.

It's worth the money. I've been using Microsoft products right from the start of my career, and I'm a big fan of Microsoft products. Many people don't like them because they work on different platforms. But the good thing about Microsoft products is that they're interlinked. For example, even if I'm a developer, the underlying development language is always going to be the same, irrespective of whether I use Dynamics 365 or ASP. The underlying programming language is always common. So, the rates are comparatively less than shifting from one Microsoft product to another, or implementing the suite of Microsoft products. The learning curve is always comparatively less.

Microsoft products are always expensive. Obviously, they are quality products, but it would be helpful if there was a reduction in price. But compared to other vendors, I think the cost is high.

I've been doing the budgeting for clients, and I find that the costing part — when we are going for new environments or we are ordering new servers — definitely plays a big part.

I would rate it between a 2 and 3 out of 5.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

I'd give it that rating because there are security glitches, but otherwise, from a usability standpoint and from the operational perspective, I think the products are really good.

We use it for software development, but we are moving to Jira.

We work with life science companies, and they need traceability. Because we have the capability of being able to provide the traceability that they require, it helps us with laying out what they need for their validation efforts.

The traceability is valuable. While managing the workflows, it was always nice to have that traceability from requirements and all the way through design. It integrates with Microsoft Test Manager (MTM), and you can have everything that is related to a requirement attached to it.

It has been really dated. When you start to work more in an agile environment, it is not really that flexible. They tried to replicate the look and feel of Jira, but it is not quite there. It was nice to use in the past, but it is not as flexible now with the changing development environments and methodologies.

It should have some of the things that Jira has, such as boards. We're focused on the scrum boards where you can actually drag and drop work from one queue to another. There should be more flexibility where you can just drag and drop as a user and have more visibility about what's active, what's not, and what's assigned to you through dashboards.

I have been using this solution for almost 14 years.

It was quite stable. We did not have a lot of issues over all those years. So, it definitely was a reliable solution for a long period of time. It just was not flexible when we started moving to a more agile model.

It was able to scale to meet our needs. It also allowed us to do our customization. I'm not sure if that ended up being a good thing, but it did allow us to do what we wanted it to do.

We have about 150 users, and they're developers, FQA, software quality engineers, business analysts, user experience team members, and architects. For its deployment and maintenance, in general, there are four or five people. They are from the DevOps team.

We don't plan to expand its usage. We're transitioning to Jira.

Their support was good. We had the support we needed for both TFS and Microsoft Test Manager.

We were not using any different solution. This company has been working with TFS for as long as I can remember. We're now transitioning to Jira.

It was fairly complex, but some of it was due to us. We did more configuration and customization, and because we customized the system, it made it more complicated.

In terms of duration, some of our previous upgrades took several days. Most of that was the actual deployment, but the preparation took several weeks.

We did use an integrator once or twice. Our experience with them was good. It was easier because we didn't have to worry about a lot of things. They took the burden of the effort, and we just had to give them information.

We haven't quantified that. In general, there has been a great time saving because with what we've done around validation artifacts, we've been able to build it right into the system. So, we can automatically generate it at the end of a release. Earlier, it would've taken us six weeks to put together a validation package. With what we've set up in TFS, it would take us a week at the max.

I was working with the engineering team, and that was not under my umbrella. From what I can remember, its license was yearly. They had the licenses on a per-user basis, and they included MTM.

I'm not really sure what they did. It was already in place when I joined the company.

I would advise Microsoft to update the tool. If a lot of users are starting to move to Jira because of the agile environment, Microsoft might want to adapt a little faster and provide similar or better functionality. It has been reliable for a very long time, and I've been really happy with it, but you've got to be able to change with the methodologies and the environments.

I would rate it a six out of 10 because it hasn't changed enough. I would've given it a much higher rating years ago, but because of the lack of evolution and not being able to adapt to the current business needs, its rating is not higher at this point.

We use TFS for project management.

Basically, the capacity to construct various products is something I find handy. For example, I could write a user story and then add some tasks to it, as well as subtasks and test cases.

Everything can be linked together, making it easy for us to track down and document hours for each and every task, whether it's a task, above, or anything else.

Everything is interconnected. As a result, tracking and viewing the bulletin board dashboard and burndown charts, among other things, is much easier.

It's a one-stop solution that is useful and makes it easier to handle.

The overall ability in the Agile process has some room to improve, even though it is interconnected. When I worked on Jira, it had the capability of better linkage.

When it comes to project management, we are having trouble with burndown charts, which we can't seem to display. As a result, we have created new tasks and realigning our process. Rather than creating larger tasks, we are creating subtasks such as development tasks, QA tasks, and deployment tasks.

An area of improvement is when there is a login for a specific user story present, it should display automatically. This is an area that where we are having difficulty and struggling in.

The scalability can be improved.

Linkage and task management are two areas that we are having difficulties with. It could be more like Jira, which has a number of different plugins. In addition, I feel that the status should include additional options. For example, they offer fewer options for a specific task user story or bugs.

I'm looking for specific options that aren't currently available, such as active status, new status, or what's currently in progress. I would like to see an in-progress capability where you can mark it active, but you can also write that it is in progress. When I look at the dashboard, there is nothing there to show me what has been done or why it is active or not.

My company has been using TFS since it started. It may be more than 10 years. I joined the company a year ago.

We have been using it through the cloud during COVID and working from home. We can connect to it from any network.

There have been some lags in the past, and we have also encountered some latency when setting it up on the laptop. You may have some problems at first, but as soon as you connect to the internet and update your product, everything becomes stable.

Within our organization, for example, we use Microsoft Teams for communication, chats, and for calls. We had some issues with it being unreliable and not fully airing the sound over the laptop speakers and mic. I discovered that as soon as we updated the product, the stability was restored. There was a problem with Teams, which they fixed and updated.

Initial difficulties are to be expected, but things are constantly improving.

It can be scaled to some extent. The main issue is that, unlike Jira or any other tool, the burndown chart is not displayed.

I have never used technical support because I've never been in a situation where it has gone down and I needed to contact them, but I believe that because Microsoft is a reputable organization with adequate technical support right now.

I have also worked with Jira.

I come from a QA background, and we used to do automation. Jira was far easier to integrate with our QA automation frameworks because it has a large number of exposed APIs and public APIs that we could use, which is a positive development. Also, the burndown charts, as well as the ability to manage different Agile model frameworks, where we could use scrum in one project but also had to use Kanban. As a result, the transition from one framework to another was simple. These are the things I found useful but haven't seen in the case of TFS yet.

Initially, TFS was a bit complicated. Now that it's Azure DevOps the initial setup is much easier.

It's a one-stop shop for building code repository, and a version control system within TFS or Azure DevOps, as TFS has been renamed.

I am a project manager.

I would rate TFS a seven out of ten

I use it  for managing. To manage the project in Git and manage branches in projects. 

Merging branches is definitely one of the more challenging aspects for people new to TFS.

I have been using it for three years. 

Stability is okay. I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a six out of ten. Sometimes, a lot of branches get mixed together, making it difficult to use. I remember struggling with these branch management issues some time ago and even wrote about them. It is so hard to review problems in TFS.

There are around 200 end users using this solution in our organization. 

I found Git to be a better overall experience. Merging branches in TFS, especially merging to the master branch, could be quite difficult. Git seemed to handle it more smoothly. However, after two years, the company decided to switch to Git.

For experienced users, it might be manageable, but for non-technical users like nurses, branching and merging in Git proved difficult. They often had to ask for help from team members because they found it challenging.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

The solution was used for software development.

It is very user-friendly.

Since the TFS was an on-prem solution, the private network accessibility was restricted. 

I have been using TFS for a year. 

It is a stable solution. I rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

It is a scalable solution. Presently, twenty to thirty users are using the solution. 

The technical support team is good and supportive. 

Positive

The IT team deployed the solution. 

There is a yearly licensing fee that needs to be paid. 

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

We use it for code archiving, complete CI/CD functionality, code propagation, code repository, etc.

Team Foundation Server (TFS) is easy to use, and we have a complete trail and traceability. We also like the access control part.

The price could be cheaper.

We're going for a cloud solution that will give us similar functionality and integration with our other products that we are customizing, like SFD. At present, those codes aren't many. 

I've been using it for more than eight years.

It is stable.

It's scalable. We have around 45 users.

We deployed it using an in-house team. You will need two to three people who are in the DevOps teams, who do all the testing, and programmers, who use it and check the code.

You will need to obtain server and account licenses.

TFS is a good product, and I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We use TFS for manual testing in our labs and as an automation tool., basically use TFS and we have the shared for that. 

The TFS was previously used for the build repository, but we have moved away from using it and we use other tools for builds. We are moving towards JIRA for other activities, such as cascade management, and test automation management.

The most valuable features of TFS are the test plans. We can reproduce reusable test plans in test automation. We have a lot of queries and this feature is very useful. 

I have been using TFS for approximately seven years.

TFS is highly stable. We have a lot of queries and the test plans can generate for automation purposes and runs very well. I prefer TFS over Jira in this area.

TFS is scalable with different Microsoft tools for test management but it is not scalable with other third-party tools.

We have more than 200 users using this solution.

We use JIRA in parallel with TFS and we are facing a lot of difficulties with JIRA because we do not receive the leverage and the same features in JIRA that we do in TFS. Our preference is TFS over JIRA.

There is some maintenance required from our team. For example, licensing and overall support. 

When the applications are developed in VideoStudio and other technologies. It's preferred to use TFS for all of the management solutions.

I rate TFS a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for test management and defect tracking. 

Most of my work is in the defect area of the solution. I like the attachments which can be directly inserted and highlighted. Users get alerted so they know when there's work required which makes the solution quite efficient. TFS also has filters that help us create a dashboard for monitoring, as well as test and script planning.

I haven't been able to get access to the test case management and execution because it requires an extra license fee. It would be helpful if that was made available to all the users who have already bought TFS.

I've been using this solution for about three years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The features in TFS are similar to those found in Jira. 

The solution came with our Microsoft package so no deployment was required, it was just a matter of clicking on the web link. We currently have more than 500 users and that will increase in the future. 

I rate the solution nine out of 10.